[kde-linux] What is your opinion of Fedora 4 Core?

[Derek S. Anderson]

On Friday 26 August 2005 16:07, Dan Maday wrote:
> This is a bait off topic but I am curious.
>
> I tried to load Fedora Core 4 on a new, but cheapie, server and I got
> Kernel Panic messages. I got around the error once. Then I got an
> ARTSmesaage saying that my sound network was not recognized using my
> onboard sound card so no sound. Three PCI sound cards later I had sound and
> could even play .WAV files. Then I tried to listen to www.live365.com 
> (internet radio) using Music Player which came up with an error in the ALSA
> defaults which I didn't know how to solve. I searched Google for Shoutcast
> players and found the XMMS is the best, and found that it is not included
> in the Fedora 4 Core release.
>
> My experience with Fedora 4 is frustrating. I wonder why everything is so
> hard.
>

> Comments?

I started my Linux experience with FC3, and was converted from Windows by it. 
Great user community, wide selection of apps and so on and so on. But it was 
not long before I was looking for another distro.

FC is too damned big - downloading and installing it is a major affair.
FC runs quite slow, methinks, most noticeably at boottime.
FC has been and may always been a Gnome-based distro. I like Gnome well enough 
but like kde better. (I know that kde is an option, but the distro is geared 
towards gnome to the extent that I've had gnome apps like gnome-config (I 
think) turn up in my KDE start menu).
As far as hardware is concerned, FC relies on Redhat's Kudzu or whatever it is 
to provide a user-friendly, out of the box experience. The payback for this 
is that I always found it difficult to configure more exotic hardware options 
myself. Automation of configuration has, in FC's case, overshadowed user 
accessibility to options. Midi, for example, and let's not even get into 
nvidia drivers. Compiling my own kernels didn't go too well either, as I 
recall.

FC *is* a great out of the box distro with a good mail-list for free support 
and as I said converted me to Linux. Now I have more experience and want more 
from my system than FC could easily give me I much prefer more minimalist 
installations. FC is not a clean base with which which to work. I now use 
Vector Linux. Slackware is great, I feel, because you can still edit text 
files to set configuration rather than rely on GUI or other apps. Perhaps I 
was less experienced back them, and correct me if I'm wrong, but this was not 
my experience with FC.

S.
-- 
Derek S. Anderson